From one of the defining poets of his generation, a new collection that plumbs the depth of beauty, history, responsibility, and love. As Far As You Know, acclaimed poet A. F. Moritz's twentieth collection of poems, begins with two sections entitled "Terrorism" and "Poetry." The book unfolds in six movements, yet it revolves around and agonizes over the struggle between these two catalyzing concepts, in all the forms they might take, eventually arguing they are the unavoidable conditions and quandaries of human life. Written and organized chronologically around before and after the poet's serious illness and heart surgery in 2014, these gorgeously unguarded poems plumb and deepen the reader's understanding of Moritz's primary and ongoing obsessions: beauty, impermanence, history, social conscience and responsibility, and, always and most urgently, love. For all its necessary engagement with worry, sorrow, and fragility, As Far As You Know sings a final insistent chorus to what it loves: "You will live."

The Toronto "Star" called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. "Plans Deranged by Time" is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place--often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs.

In the introduction, A.F. Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of "flaneur," impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of "communion-in-isolation." He contrasts Fetherling's contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsider's fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political.

Fetherling's afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches--"the desire to create new codes of hearing" and "writing-to-heal"--and how they are reflected in the collection.

To read A.F. Moritz is to find out what it means to be alive at this juncture of history. These poems are mansions, both derelict and opulent. Wander in with the mind open and hear what the ages, humanity, and the myth of progress have wrought. Night Street Repairs contains necessary meditations on time, modernity, and our current situation as a society of appetite flirting with self-destruction. Many voices act as vigilant witness to our urban wastes and wastefulness. Moritz's unmistakable cadences -- magisterial, philosophical, and funny -- mingle among the ancients, the Bible, Leopardi, Montale, and Rilke as he extends his already prestigious and singular poetic project.